Sophia was running around the halls of a great house, and there was joy there, not flames. She and Kate were laughing, her sister's smaller hands reaching up for the bronze figurine of a horse, the edge of a tablecloth.
"Be careful, girls," Anora called from behind them, the nanny following along in their wake. "You mustn't disturb your father."
But I want Daddy, Kate sent over to Sophia. I want to play soldiers.
We could find Mother, Sophia sent back. She could tell us a story.
Sophia loved listening to old stories told in that beautiful, peaceful-sounding voice: Bren and the Giant, The Seven Sisters of the Island; it seemed that their mother knew more stories than there were stars in the sky, telling them about all the old creatures of magic that were now so rare they barely touched the world.
They laughed again and ran on, a conversation only they could hear whispering between them. They ran and hid, playing hide and seek while men and women brought in barrels and boxes and chests and sacks. They didn't talk about the possibility of a siege, but Sophia knew anyway. She and Kate always knew.
In spite of Anora's words, she found Kate heading toward her father's study. Sophia followed, and now she could hear her father arguing with a man who looked too much like Sebastian for it to be a coincidence. She frowned, wondering who Sebastian was, and why it should matter.
"I told you, Henry, I have no interest in your throne, whatever your spies say."
"But you still side with the rebels."
"Agreeing that there should be some kind of assembly is not the same thing as fighting against you."
"It is exactly the same!"
Sophia wanted to stay and hear the rest, but she was standing in a hall of mirrors now, and it seemed that every mirror held a scene of her parents' lives. It was only as she saw it that she realized she was dreaming, not there in truth. She saw them first meeting, falling in love in a way that reminded her heartbreakingly of her and Sebastian. She saw them riding through their lands dispensing justice and helping people who had nothing.
There were darker scenes too. The civil wars came, in a swirl of blood and musket smoke. Sophia saw her father fighting in battle, heard her mother arguing with courtiers she didn't recognize.
"I don't care if we do have the blood, trying to claim the throne now would just cost more lives."
Sophia saw more battles, and tense scenes around a great house she knew from a thousand other dreams. There was no context for it, and the images shifted too fast for Sophia to follow more than a few glimpses of each. As with so many of her dreams, she had the feeling that this was more, but she didn't understand it, couldn't place all the details.
She drifted on to a fresh set of mirrors, and for a moment she thought that she was looking at herself. The deep red hair was the same, and so were the features, but there was something in the girl who stood there that reminded her of Sebastian as well. Somehow, Sophia knew that this was their daughter.
The image flickered, then vanished.
Sophia plunged deeper into the endless hall of mirrors, trying to see more of what might happen, trying to understand, but the mirrors seemed to open out onto every facet of the world, and it was hard to tell what was real and what was imaginary, what was happening now and what might still be to happen. There was too much of it. There was simply…
Sophia woke with a gasp in the morning light, because the pressure of all those futures had felt so real, so immediate. She blinked, trying to make sense of it all and judge if anything she'd seen was real. It felt real. Sophia could still see the face of her daughter, and she wanted that to be real.
She wanted it, but even so, she hesitated. This was such a dangerous world to bring a child into, and such a dangerous situation. She couldn't offer the safety of a grand house, or the peace of a settled life. She couldn't even offer her child a father, because Sebastian was out there somewhere, separated from her by distance and his family's pressures.
Even so, Sophia couldn't think about the face she'd seen without feeling a deep wave of love. She wanted to see her daughter, watch her grow up into that.
Of course, for that to happen, at least one thing had to happen first. Sophia took hold of the powder pouch Cora had given her, balancing it, staring at it. Then she stood and threw it, sending it as far from her as she could manage, away onto the mossy ground in the distance.
***
It took even longer than it looked to reach the great house, because the hills and the trees of Monthys worked to stretch out the space around them, forcing the road to wind rather than proceeding in a straight line. There were moments when Sophia couldn't see the house at all, and it was only guesswork whether they were going in the right direction.
The roads were empty this morning, without the occasional travelers Sophia was used to passing. The whole space felt quiet, almost abandoned, or simply so remote that there was no one else to pass. Their cart rumbling along the road was the loudest thing around by far.
Sophia had to admit that the landscape around them was beautiful. Monthys had rolling hills lined with moss-covered boulders, trees of shimmering green and red, and brooks that ran alongside the path, bubbling and foaming as they hit stones. Sophia could imagine…no, she could remember, those hills covered in snow in the winter, when the whole place turned into a thing of stark, beautiful white and no one could travel on the roads.
Thankfully, there was no snow on the ground now, and the cart could still make its way along the road without any problems beyond the occasional windblown branch. Around them, birds twittered in the trees, and the wind blew through the gaps in the hills. Somewhere above, Sophia saw a buzzard circling, obviously on the hunt for the hares that crouched low among the moss. There were even a few sheep, with the wild look of things left to fend for themselves for most of the year.
Sophia started to see other animal signs, too, more worrying ones. There were scratches on some of the trees they passed, obviously some kind of territorial marking, and prints by the side of the road that indicated an animal bigger than anything they'd seen so far.
Somewhere in the distance, Sophia heard a howl, the sound of a wolf's voice bouncing off the sides of the hills around them. It was a high, piercing note that seemed to last longer than it should, sustained by its echoes as it claimed the space around it. There was no answering chorus from a pack, but maybe that just meant they were being quiet.
Sophia could feel the nervousness of the others at that sound. Cora started looking around as if expecting a pack of wolves to leap out at any moment. Emeline was still, but she had a look that said she was stretching out her own powers, trying to find any sense of approaching danger. As for Sienne, the forest cat started, and then ran off the path, into a patch of trees.
"Sienne, wait," Sophia called after her, reinforcing the instruction with a pulse of her mental abilities. The forest cat ignored it, quickly disappearing from sight. Was she scared, or hungry, or just being wary?
"She'll be all right," Emeline said. She looked around again. "It's us I'm worried about. Whatever made that sound is close. We need to keep moving."
They kept going, pushing the horses forward faster now. Before, it had been easy to appreciate the beauty of the surrounding countryside, but now Sophia found herself watching it for signs of the creature that had made the sound they'd heard. She reached out with her powers, trying to pick out the minds of approaching creatures the way she was able to touch Sienne's mind, but it was hard to differentiate between them, or to know if any of them posed a threat.
At least one of them did, though, because a little way further on, they found a body.
It took a moment to identify it as human, because large parts of it were missing. It lay at the side of the road, obviously pulled there by whatever had attacked it. The remains of rough-spun clothes hinted at a farmer or a herder, perhaps a shepherd to some of the sheep that Sophia had seen out on the hills. Whoever this person had been, they were long past any kind of help.
"We should bury them," Cora said. "We should give them that much dignity at least."
"There's no time," Emeline replied. "What if the thing that did this comes back?"
They looked over to Sophia, and it seemed that she was going to get to make the final decision. Before she could do so, however, she felt the flicker of a mind in the trees near the road.
A wolf padded out, and it was a long way from being one of the scrawny pack wolves that people sometimes hunted to keep their animals safe. This thing was at least as high as Sophia's waist at the shoulder, with dark fur and a ruff at its throat almost like a lion's mane. Its eyes had a golden shine to them, and its teeth, when it bared them, seemed like daggers.
It growled as it approached.
"Send it away," Emeline said to Sophia. "If you manage to control that cat of yours, maybe you can manage it with this wolf."
Sophia wanted to point out that Emeline had her own powers, but this wasn't the time. Instead, she reached out, touching the mind of the advancing wolf, trying to soothe it. She found only madness and violence. This wasn't an animal that could be soothed or persuaded. It was a thing without a pack, driven to kill by an anger that nothing could control.
Even as Sophia thought that, it leapt. The horses reared, and one screamed as the lone wolf's teeth fastened onto its throat. Blood splashed, and Sophia felt the head of it against her skin.
"Get up into the trees," she yelled to the others.
They didn't need to be told twice. Emeline ran from the cart to the nearest tree, with Cora following in her wake. Sophia had a moment of staring at the wolf as it brought down one of their cart horses, then she slashed through the reins that held the other with a knife, at least giving it a chance at survival.
She sprinted for the tree, and as she ran, she heard the wolf bark, rushing in behind her. She ran to the trunk and leapt, grabbing for the branches even as she felt teeth pulling at the hem of her dress. She heard it tear and didn't care, just struggling to get up out of the beast's way. Emeline and Cora caught her arms, pulling her up onto the thick branches near the heart of the tree.
"Wolves can't climb, can they?" Cora asked.
"They can't climb," Emeline said. "But they can be patient."
Sure enough, the lone wolf was down on the ground, staring up at them. Would it go away, given time? Sophia had to hope so. She tried to push it away with her talent, but its mind was still a closed thing of hunger and violence.
"There's something wrong with it," she said. "It feels like there's no way into its mind."
"It might be rabid," Emeline guessed. "Or it might just be something so violent that even you can't affect it. Probably it was forced out of its pack for a reason."
Whatever it was, Sophia couldn't affect the creature, which meant that they were stuck. They could sit there until the wolf got bored, but if that didn't happen, then they would stay there until they slept or starved, or just got too weak to cling onto the tree. Then it would have them.
Then Sophia saw a familiar flicker of soft gray fur, and her heart tightened.
Sienne, don't!
It was too late though, because the young forest cat was already flinging herself forward. She was smaller than the wolf, and younger, and certainly less insane, but the forest cat still slammed into it in a flurry of fur that knocked the wolf to the ground.
The next few seconds were impossible to follow, as the two animals struck and wrestled, growled and fought. The wolf tried to bring its teeth to bear, but Sienne struck out with both teeth and claws, twisting impossibly as she raked the wolf with them. In an instant, she was behind it, and her teeth clamped down on the wolf's neck.
Sophia heard a crack, and the wolf went limp.
She rushed down from the tree, hurrying to Sienne. The forest cat had blood on her coat, but it was impossible to see if any of it was her own. Sophia hugged her close, not caring if she got blood on her dress.
"That was such a dangerous thing to do," Sophia whispered. "You could have been killed."
But the cat hadn't been. Instead, she'd slain the wolf, and now she purred, licking Sophia's hand as Sophia made sure the cat wasn't wounded. She wasn't. More than that, she'd saved them. Sophia held onto her, looking around. One of their horses was dead, while the other had run and was nowhere to be seen. Their cart was too heavy to move by hand, and anyway, there were only so many supplies left on it. She looked ahead to where the estate still sat, beckoning her onward, then turned back to the others.
"It looks as though we have to walk from here."